Roosevelt’s Lincoln – A long-gone Lincoln painting—gifted to Theodore Roosevelt, sold to J. P. Morgan, and kept in private hands for decades—will reappear this July at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. The work once sat where Roosevelt could s
When Theodore Roosevelt faced a difficult choice as president, he didn’t reach for a memo first. He looked up.
For years, Roosevelt kept a Lincoln portrait above the fireplace in his office in the newly built West Wing. The painting—created by Ernest G. Wells—wasn’t just decoration. Roosevelt told people it was the place he went when “confronted with a great problem. ” saying he did what he believed Lincoln would have done.
That portrait, long out of public view, is now about to return to the public through the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which opens this July 4 in Medora, North Dakota, as part of the greater America 250 celebration.
The road back to that moment has been anything but direct. The portrait passed from Roosevelt’s White House to a financier’s collection, then to private owners who spent years trying to reconstruct how the painting traveled—and what it had “seen” across generations of American leadership.
The Lincoln Roosevelt kept within reach
The painting began far from the West Wing. In 1899, Ernest G. Wells finished an oil portrait based on a celebrated Lincoln campaign photograph commissioned nearly 40 years earlier by artist Thomas Hicks in Springfield, when Hicks had been unable to capture Lincoln’s likeness from the flesh.
The photograph, posed inside Springfield’s State House, showed the clean-shaven Lincoln as he appeared in the weeks following his nomination for president—when tensions between North and South had been tilting toward secession.
Wells’ later oil on canvas reflects the same choice: Lincoln in three-quarter profile. in his usual formal attire. with a weathered face that suggested both the weight of the coming crisis and the resolve meant to carry him and the nation through it. The original photograph had been widely circulated. inspiring both Hicks’ painting and its adaptation into a campaign lithograph. and it was later reissued as a model for Wells.
The result became Wells’ only known portrait of Lincoln—an unusual match for a young president. Roosevelt was gifted a clean-shaven “Honest Abe” rather than the more common bewhiskered “Father Abraham” image.
Wells sent the finished work to Roosevelt and received a letter dated Oct. 5, 1903. Roosevelt wrote: “I am greatly pleased with the Lincoln picture,” adding he regarded it as “a real addition to the White House.”
In Roosevelt’s telling, it wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was practical.
“When I am confronted with a great problem, I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done. I have always felt that if I could do as he would have done were he in my place, I would not be far from right.”
By the time Roosevelt assumed the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in September 1901. he had already begun bringing Lincoln into the White House—not only as an ideal. but as an object. Roosevelt spoke frequently of looking to Lincoln’s example when faced with difficult decisions. and aides and cabinet officers recalled him asking. “What would Lincoln do?”.
As Roosevelt himself put it, the Wells painting often became his first answer.
Roosevelt’s Lincoln wasn’t only about history—it was about governance
The portrait also fit a broader theory Roosevelt embraced: what he described as his “Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency,” which he bluntly called a kind of “tempered radicalism.”
Roosevelt kept returning to Lincoln in other ways too. He made two visits to Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield. and for his second inauguration in 1905 he wore a ring containing a strand of Lincoln’s hair. The ring was a gift from his secretary of state. John Hay—who had begun his public service career as Lincoln’s assistant White House secretary.
In February 1909. in the final three weeks of his presidency. Roosevelt ensured he was on hand for Lincoln centennial observances at the Kentucky birthplace of the late president. He hailed Lincoln as “the mightiest of the mighty men. ” and described how “his blood was shed for the union of the people.”.
Then came 1919’s version of the unthinkable—only it happened three years earlier for Roosevelt, not long after he’d surrendered the painting.
In 1908?. No: three years after the 1905 inauguration. a would-be assassin took aim at Roosevelt in 1919’s shadow—but the facts are clear in the record: Roosevelt was spared when the bullet struck the eyeglass case he carried in his breast pocket. then passed through the thick manuscript of an oration he was about to deliver in his ill-fated campaign to win back the presidency. Though wounded, Roosevelt delivered the address as scheduled.
By then, though, he had already given up the Wells painting.
The portrait leaves the White House—and finds its way to J. P. Morgan
When Roosevelt left the White House in March 1909, he presented the canvas to his chief disbursing officer, Col. William H. Crook.
Crook wasn’t a random administrator. He had served as one of Lincoln’s personal bodyguards during the final year of Lincoln’s life. A former Washington policeman. Crook had been assigned to the night shift at the White House—one of four plainclothesmen tasked with providing round-the-clock protection to Lincoln wherever he went.
Weeks before Lincoln’s death, Crook was drafted into the Union army—though he had fought previously—requiring Lincoln to write an exemption from further service so Crook could continue working in the White House.
Crook was the guard at Lincoln’s side during the perilous day in Richmond. On April 4, 1865—just one day after the Confederate capital fell—Crook walked with Lincoln along with a small contingent of Marines through streets still thick with smoke and danger.
Crook also witnessed freed Blacks rush to greet Lincoln there with “unrestrained joy,” and Lincoln asked them to thank only God for “the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.”
Crook remained close to Lincoln right up to the end. speaking with Lincoln just before the president and his wife left the White House for Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14. 1865. Crook stayed in the White House for approximately 50 years under 12 successive administrations. from Lincoln through Woodrow Wilson. and his tenure ended only with his death in office in 1915.
He later recounted his experiences in two memoirs: “Through Five Administrations” (1910) and “Memories of the White House” (1911).
In 1912—three years before Crook died—Crook sold the Wells Lincoln portrait to financier J. P. Morgan through Morgan’s chief librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who managed and expanded Morgan’s vast art collection. Morgan personally approved the acquisition.
After Morgan died one year later, Morgan’s Americana collection was partially donated to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Morgan Library and the Frick Collection. Other objects were dispensed through sale.
Wells’ Lincoln then moved into the secondary art market. In the late 1970s, it was acquired by private collectors in Westchester County, New York, where it remained for more than four decades.
In 2021. retired financial adviser turned multimedia artist David Eric Soderquist and his brother John Carl Soderquist were gifted the Lincoln portrait by a relative. Although both brothers are co-owners of the painting. it was David who drove a new round of research—pursuing the provenance and history with “determination and persistence.”.
He began extensive conservation work and conducted a deep investigation to reconstruct the portrait’s journey. His early guide was a typewritten label affixed to the verso of the canvas, identifying the artist and documenting the sale from Crook to Morgan on Jan. 5, 1912.
That reconstruction is now part of the work’s return to public view.
A portrait that now points at the next audience
This July 4 opening in Medora, North Dakota will place Wells’ Lincoln in a new public setting: the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
The library opening will include a collection designed to tell the story of TR’s life. ideas. and influence through personal mementoes and artifacts. interactive exhibits. and the landscape of Theodore Roosevelt National Park—where the Badlands ecosystem and the Little Missouri River preserved the rugged terrain that captivated Roosevelt during his two years here in the 1880s.
Visitors will see the painting first on the surface: a portraiture tradition meant to do more than replicate a photographic likeness, aiming to convey character and spirit.
But the portrait’s history adds another layer—one connected across generations of leaders bound by personal history and public duty.
It also comes with a long list of the political and civic themes Roosevelt is known to have fought for. In the years when Roosevelt’s eyes rested often on the Wells painting. he railed against corporate monopolies and pushed for business regulation and consumer protection. along with major initiatives like the Pure Food and Drug Act. His agenda also included expanding national parks and national forests. building the Panama Canal. and dispatching the Navy’s 16-battleship “Great White Fleet” on a circumnavigation intended to demonstrate American power and goodwill.
The portrait’s pairing of Lincoln and Roosevelt is also explicitly linked to a common thread: both men supported the common citizen. Lincoln expanded executive authority to preserve the Union and end slavery. Roosevelt regulated concentrated wealth and conserved about 230 million acres of wildlands for the benefit of all Americans.
Wells’ painting, the library materials say, embodies the enduring American principle of E pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—with Lincoln’s image standing in for values like perseverance, democracy, liberty, and the pursuit of equality and opportunity.
The work arrives at an especially symbolic time as the United States moves toward the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Names behind the scholarship, and documents behind the provenance
The essay tracing the portrait’s meaning and route is authored by historians Douglas Brinkley and Harold Holzer.
Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and a professor of history at Rice University, and a board member of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.
They are also the authors of the forthcoming “The Railsplitter and the Rough Rider: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and the Power of Remembrance.”
Their reporting points to primary documentation supporting the painting’s provenance, including the original typewritten label dated Jan. 5, 1912, affixed to the canvas verso and documenting the sale from Col. William H. Crook to J. P. Morgan.
The record also includes correspondence from Theodore Roosevelt to Ernest G. Wells dated Oct. 5. 1903. preserved in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division; historical photographs of the Roosevelt White House executive office. circa 1903-04. showing a Lincoln portrait consistent with the Wells composition; and correspondence preserved at the Morgan Library. New York. confirming Belle da Costa Greene’s involvement in the Morgan acquisition.
The documentation further notes acceptance of the painting for inclusion in the grand opening exhibition of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, following a comprehensive review of supporting materials.
Two published references are cited in the documentation section: TR’s comments on the Lincoln painting from Charles T. White. “Lincoln and Prohibition” (NYL Abingdon Press. 1921). 111; and a second part of a quote from Merrill Peterson. “Lincoln in American Memory” (NY: Oxford University Press. 1994). 164.
For many Americans, the portrait’s story will begin again with a museum label and a new room of visitors. For Roosevelt, it began the moment he decided the past could answer the present—by looking up, and doing what he believed Lincoln would have done.
Theodore Roosevelt Abraham Lincoln portrait Ernest G. Wells J. P. Morgan Belle da Costa Greene William H. Crook Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library America 250 Pure Food and Drug Act Panama Canal Great White Fleet Lincoln provenance